


how the heart approaches what it yearns

by Lirazel



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-24
Updated: 2010-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-14 01:25:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/143828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lirazel/pseuds/Lirazel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The war to end all wars may be shaking the foundations of the world, but Lady Sibyl Crawley is terribly young--and in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	how the heart approaches what it yearns

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VegaOfTheLyre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VegaOfTheLyre/gifts).



“Only a war could make you two possible,” Mary says with that biting edge of hers that has only grown more pronounced since Matthew donned his uniform and left without word. “If there weren’t millions of people killing each other in the most horrific ways imaginable and names we recognize appearing in lists in the newspaper each morning, it would cause the biggest scandal Downton Abbey’s ever known.” She folds the newspaper crisply and glares at Sibyl. “You’re lucky there’s all that bloodshed and uncertainty to distract everyone.”

It’s only jealousy and fear that makes Mary talk like that, Sibyl knows. Fear because who wouldn’t be afraid in times like these? and because it hangs like a suffocating pall over all of them here at home as they move through the motions of life. And jealousy, thick and bitter, because Mary was standing on the upstairs landing when Tom left and neither he nor Sibyl knew she was there watching until afterwards. He had caught Sibyl’s hand and said, “Can I write to you, my lady?” and even though the request was earnest, he lent the honorific enough of a lightness that it seemed like he was playacting some knight going off to fight with his lady’s token tucked inside his armor—as though the distance between their positions, which only a few weeks before had seem so unfathomably large to her was now no more than the size of a puddle he could step over quite easily if he wished without wetting his boots at all. Tom had never really believed in aristocracy and social castes, of course, but while her rejection of them had been as dramatic a rebellion as a girl who was, after all, quite kind and thoughtful could orchestrate, he simply acknowledged that the harsh bars of social convention remained—for a time—but that they were weakening and that soon they would be shattered completely. To Sibyl, the time of upheaval and revolution that sometimes seemed rushing towards them was exciting, thrilling her to her fingertips in a rush of pamphlets and elections and bloomers; to Tom, it was simply the way the world would _have_ to be in the future. He was never one given to doubt.

And maybe Mary was right, that it was only living in a world so dreadfully weighted down by uncertainty that allowed her to give him enough encouragement to prompt him to speak, to kiss her, to look at her with his heart in his eyes that way. Or perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps he would have courted her anyways, sneaking letters up to her room with the help of a kind-eyed Anna and arranging for meetings behind the stables late at night. Perhaps they would have eloped in the middle of the night on her birthday and run away to London or Dublin or America and she would have had to learn to live simply and work alongside him, getting used to blisters and worn clothes and forgetting about pearls and dinner party chatter. Perhaps her father would have found her letter propped up on the mantelpiece and blustered and stormed and disowned her, and perhaps years later her mother would finally have convinced him to forgive her and she and Tom could have once again entered the house she has loved since childhood, this time hand in hand.

But none of that is necessary now. Not when Tom caught her around the waist and kissed her right in the foyer of the Crawley’s ancestral home in broad daylight, not when William brings up the mail each morning at breakfast and hands Sibyl Tom’s letters right in front of Papa, who pretends not to notice. After all, in a world where the heir to Downton Abbey is fighting alongside former stableboys and factory workers and the sons of members of Parliament and terror presses down and in and around from all sides, even the Earl of Grantham can’t muster up anger at the presumption of a former chauffer writing love letters to his daughter—though perhaps he wouldn’t be quite so calm if he knew that they weren’t _only_ love letters and that for every line about how he missed her and thought of her often, there were two about the horrific details of modern warfare and three about his dreams for a new world they would build, together, from the ashes of the old one that was burning to the ground around them.

There _is_ so much fear and uncertainty swirling about, and Sibyl knows that he could be killed in Flanders or maimed in the Mediterranean, though she cannot quite bring herself to believe it. Not when they’re so very young and there’s so much that they both want to _do_ and accomplish. Sometimes the war seems like it’s brought even more opportunities, and she feels so guilty for the rush of accomplished pleasure she gets at Red Cross meetings and hospital visits.

But she lies on her bed, reading and rereading his letters till they’re in tatters, and there’s a world rising up before her eyes—a better one, one she and Tom can help build. And she wants it so badly that sometimes it seems almost as if it is there right in front of her, and she’s been raised to believe that there is nothing she wants that won’t, eventually, be given to her.

She is, after all, terribly young.


End file.
